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Warning on spread of state surveillance

The Guardian, UK
Apr. 21, 2005
Richard Norton-Taylor
www.guardian.co.uk

ReligionNewsBlog.com • Thursday April 21, 2005

Governments are building a “global registration and surveillance infrastructure” in the US-led “war on terror”, civil liberty groups warned yesterday.

The aim is to monitor the movements and activities of entire populations in what campaigners call “an unprecedented project of social control”.

The warning came from the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, including the American Civil Liberties Union, and Statewatch, a UK-based bulletin which tracks developments in the EU.

They point to the system whereby all visitors to the US are to be digitally photographed and fingerprinted. The EU has agreed that member states must fingerprint all passport holders by the end of 2007. The information will be held on databases.

National ID cards, they warn, will become a “globally interoperable biometric passport”. The setting up of airlines’ passenger name records (PNRs) could include more than 60 different kinds of information, including meal choices which could reveal personal, religious or ethnic affiliations.

The US and EU governments are expanding legal powers to eavesdrop and to store the product of intercepted personal communications, the groups warn.

They also point to an agreement between Europol – the EU’s incipient police headquarters – and the US giving what they say will be an unlimited number of American agencies access to sensitive information on the race, political opinions, religious beliefs, health and sexual life of individuals.

The groups point to increasingly close cooperation between national police, security, intelligence, and military establishments.

To achieve their ends, they say, governments have suspended judicial oversight over law enforcement agents and public officials, concentrated unprecedented power in the hands of the executive arm of government, and rolled back criminal law and due process protections that balance the rights of individuals against the power of the state.

These initiatives, say the civil liberty groups, are not effective in identifying terrorists.

More articles on the USA in The Guardian online